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Marshmallow Peeps On the Internet – A Study

I saw 100 Ways to Kill a Peep a couple days ago and thought, “Internet Marshmallow Peep Season started already?” It must have, though, Peeps links are popping off all over the place. To celebrate, I went on the Google and found all of the Marshmallow Peeps links worth looking at. There are 155 links in this post, and you’re not going to be able to click on all of them, so book mark and come back later. If I’ve left out a quality Peep link, by all means, send it to me. (Peeps previously covered on Unlikely Words here.)

I would call marshmallow Peeps ‘the Bacon of the nineties’ for the way they captured the hearts and minds of internet users everywhere. Both bacon and Peeps are bad for you and delicious, and for some reason, that makes the crazy things you do with them so viral. Much Traditional Media ink has been spilled attempting to chronicle the Peep phenomenon and none of it has gotten any closer to figuring it out than any of the more recent coverage of the bacon meme. You can view some of the attempts in Salon , The Phoenix, Slate, More Intelligent Life, and the New York Times. Here’s a Brand Study of Peeps upon the brand’s 50th anniversary, which was in 2003.

Along with Traditional Media, web citizens from all over documented their passion with expressions of crude HTML (these are the links to click if you want to remember what the internet looked like before Web 2.0). Unfortunately, many of these websites have long since been abandoned and now float without mooring, along a marshmallow sea of wistfulness. Tracy & Mia’s Peep-O-Rama is better than the current Peeps site, and here’s their list of Peepy Links, not all of which still work. Geekbabe’s Big List of Peeps Links is also a good place to grasp Peep culture circa 2003. What is it about Tripod? PAGE O’ PEEPS might be the worst site on the internet (in a ‘in-case-you-forgot-what-the-internet-looked-like-in-1997 way), but Peep Page is a seizure-inducing second. This unofficial Peep fan club is devoid of anything remarkable, the unofficial Marshmallow Peep page is very yellow, and Pop-Cult.com’s Peeps page has a lot of facts, but the granddaddy of all Peeps fact lists is Alt.Food’s Peeps FAQ.

On the more nefarious side of Peep activities, there is Peep jousting, Peep fighting, Peep War, a turn based Peep strategy game, and this amazing Peep prank, which really deserves the attention of the writers of The Office for some Jim vs. Dwight inspiration.

I like Peeps, I just don’t want to eat a lot of them all at once so I would stay away from this Peep eating contest in Florida, or this one in Buffalo, or this one in Maryland, which I don’t think happens anymore, or this one in Sacramento that definitely still happens. (Incidentally in 2007, they had an amazing painting of a large sock monkey humping a Peep on the moon as a prize.) (Further, someone sent them marshmallow Peep porn, which is entirely unsafe for work and which I beg you not to look at. There’s some things you can’t unsee and this is one of them.) Lastly, this Peep eating contest from the This or That Burlesque Game Show takes a strange turn halfway through.

Peeps is a book not about Peeps. Yoga Peeps is a website not about Peeps doing yoga. Peeps is a social utility not about Peeps. Six Peeps is a blog not about six Peeps. Peeps is an iPhone application not about Peeps.

I’ve come to the end and don’t have a paragraph to put this post about 7 bizarre marketing vehicles, this post about being stalked by Peeps, this post about a city in PA dropping a giant Peep on NYE, or this one about Peeps being Harbingers of Doom for the Human Race. I actually didn’t have the patience to read that one all the way through, but if those pictures of kittens grown in bottles bother you, don’t click through. On the research front, a friend put a Peep into a glass blowing kiln and it kept it’s shape for 25 minutes, a peanut M&M lasted only 6 minutes.

Hey thanks for the letter! I’ll pass on your site and possibly get off my lazy ass and put a link to it from the Peep Off page. On Friday, April 10, there will be a showing of “The Power of the Peep” in Sacramento. I’ll make that my link, but it’s also http://www.shiny-object.com/screenings/ I’ll be giving a crappy sort of talk or interview after both showings. The Peep porn is disgusting and funny.

[…] case study about how many Marshmallow Peeps the are mentioned on the internet. In his post Marshmallow Peeps on the Internet Aaron found 141 instances where the Peeps Candy or marshmallow is mentioned. There are blogs, news, […]

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[…] the internet has already given us the Peeps Office Contest, Peeps lip balm, and literally about 100 other similar instances designed to entice us into buying this sh*tty candy with creative crafts campaigns on a medium […]

[…] check out PeepsShow, showcasing bizarre art made entirely of Peeps! Finally, you can visit the blog Unlikely Words, where blogger Aaron Cohen has taken to documenting the existence of Peeps on the […]

Aaron! Whoever you are…. thanks so much for the link to my Almond rebuttal, and the kind recommendation. The man must be stopped.

That’s an insane compilation of Peeps pages. Okay, enough with the -ation words. And I second your nomination (damn) for a FlufferNutter state sandwich. Perhaps I’ll see you at the next What the Fluff festival in Union Square? Somervillians, unite.

[…] Cohen conducted extensive research into the online world of Marshmallow Peeps. The result, “Marshmallow Peeps on the Internet – A study,” features at least 155 annotated links to Peep related content on the web. He writes […]

[…] the internet has already given us the Peeps Office Contest, Peeps lip balm, and literally about 100 other similar instances designed to entice us into buying this sh*tty candy with creative crafts campaigns on a medium […]